Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis is 80 years old today. In addition to his outstanding skills as a singer and stage performer, Jerry Lee practically invented the school of Rock and Roll piano playing from a stew of blues, boogie woogie, country, western swing, Tin Pan Alley, and gospel influences. He doesn't sound like anyone else (other than his piano playing cousins Jimmy Swaggart and Mickey Gilley) because his style is all his own. The movie Great Balls of Fire claimed that Jerry Lee had a "black left hand and a white right hand," but that's oversimplifying things. Jerry Lee took all of the aspects of the music he loved and played in his youth and unified them into something new. The fact that he sounds so original probably has as much do with the relative isolation of growing up in Louisiana in the 30s and 40s as anything else without formally trained teachers or more than a handful of local musicians to tell him that he was doing things “wrong.” By the time he stepped into Sun Studios in 1956 at the age of 21, his style was fully formed and showed no signs of bending upon exposure to the wider world of professional music. You could put someone in a room for 20 years with a piano and all of the same music that Jerry Lee heard growing up, and you would probably still never end up with someone who plays exactly the way that he does. But, you might end up something equally interesting. Jerry Lee Lewis is a perfect example of what can happen when someone freely throws their influences together without concern for stylistic purity. By focusing on the things he liked and dropping whatever the didn't (for example, he rarely plays more than 3 chords in a tune, and tops out at 5-6 max) he ended up with something entirely unique. Students can replicate this process using similar methods: make a list or think about the aspects that you like most from your favorite players or styles of music (no matter how off the wall, cheesy, or un-hip) and think of interesting ways to combine them, the stranger the better. You'll eventually make connections that will make sense only to your particular taste, and over time these will form the elements of your individual style. Let's wrap up with the man himself. This is Jerry Lee on the Steve Allen show in 1957, playing the scandalous “Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On” as his national television debut. Note his legendary left hand providing a gospel-boogie foundation and doubling as “bass player” for the band. Also note Steve Allen (from off camera) getting so excited that he throws his chair across the stage at 1:40. :) This is a guy that I just heard on the radio a few weeks ago. I absolutely love his sound. The classical and jazz influenced keyboard playing is wonderful on its own, but the arrangements are the real standouts, with film score quality strings and ambient electronics contributing equally at different points. One of the lessons that I take from Bill Laurance is to avoid being constrained by narrow stylistic boundaries. While the music is obviously connected to his parallel gig as a film composer, there's also influence from non-Western/World music in places as well as fusion, electronica, and his equally eclectic membership in the band Snarky Puppy. I can honestly say that his album doesn't sound quite like any other jazz album that I've heard in recent memory. While teaching my lessons this week, I've noticed that many of my beginning piano students are all running into the same problems. Many if not all of these can be traced back to the way they are practicing their pieces at home (or not practicing them as the case may be). The good news is that many of these habits can be replaced via the same method that cemented them in the first place: repetition. This week, I'll be talking about some common roadblocks in learning and polishing new pieces, and ways to avoid or replace them.
For example...Rule number one: practice efficiently. When working on a new piece it's very tempting to play through the sections that you can already play well and/or sections that repeat frequently. Or to play through the whole piece over and over again, stumbles and all, hoping that if you do it enough times it will eventually reach perfection. This is not an effective use of your time. The number of sections that actually give you trouble, assuming that the piece is somewhere near your current level, should only comprise 10 to 20% of the piece, at most. In the beginning, that 10 to 20% should receive 100% of your time when practicing that particular piece. To determine this: first identify any sections that you can already play with both hands together at the final tempo. These require the least attention. Then eliminate any passages that you can play at tempo with hands separate. There may be passages where one hand is solid but the other requires some or significant practice; you may only need to work on one of the hands in a given section. Your attention will be focused on whatever is left: sections that you can not play at tempo even with separated hands. To narrow things down further, ignore any passages that repeat earlier material verbatim. You now have a "laundry list" of passages and sections that you should be working on. |